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Ask HN: Can an Internet start-up outsource development of their website?

5 points by Michiel ↗ HN
Typical Type 1N startup personality (social transformer), the founders lack technical skills and want to focus on building the business. They have asked our agency to build the site (consumer-facing front-end with search, discovery and payment, customer-facing back-end for managing data) and do some of the marketing activities (like search engine optimization and marketing).

Is that a recipe for success? I was under the impression that an internet startup needs to build its own team of employees, including a team of web developers.

4 comments

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digamber_kamat
If your requirements w.r.t website are very clear and if the website will not have major up-gradations in short intervals then I suggest you go for some small-time web development company.
sdrinf
It depends. If they are shooting for a "small business opportunity", as in: creating their jobs, and they position themselves as such in the market, yes, it can fly.

However, if we're talking high-growth startups here, then no. Read eg. Paypal Wars: half of the battles are fought online, with technological fire&motion; your run of the mill agency will not have coverage for that.

trussi
You need one Senior Developer/Architect/Bad-Ass Technical Person on your team. Preferably, you need somebody that has experience dealing with $5/hr offshore developers (i.e. they have learned how to effectively use them on somebody else's dime). $5/hr sounds cheap until it takes 4 weeks to deliver a crappy deliverable that doesn't work, then you start feeling just how expensive $5/hr can be. :)

That technical person can source qualified offshore talent, bundle up both design and development projects to outsource, do the heavy lifting programming that just can't be done via outsourcing and they will be able to setup your infrastructure.

Without that one technical person on your team, there's virtually no chance you'll be able to effectively use an offshore developer.

To find this person, find some local companies with at least 100 employees that build a web-based product. Call up pretending to be a manager for an offshore development firm and speak with their Director of Development or CTO. Your goal is to find a local company that currently outsources their development. Then find who their senior developers/architects are and poach them. They will be eager to join a start-up, they won't realize how valuable they are and they'll know how to deal with outsourcing projects.

ig1
It depends on the nature of the business, if the technology is a key differentiator for their business then using a third party agency will likely be difficult.

If it's primarily a business model innovation with fairly standard tech then it might be more doable.